The manuscript of "Mourning and Melancholia" dates from 1915, but the paper was not published until two years later. In this short, rich article, Freud described the essence of melancholia by comparing it to the normal affect of mourning. He distanced himself from the psychiatric perspective he had once adopted in "Draft G" of the Fliess papers (1950a [1895]), while emphasizing that the concept of melancholia had many aspects (especially somatic ones) that he would not examine. Methodologically speaking, here as so often we encounter Freud's continual effort to clarify the psychopathological by reference to the normal (as for example with dreams, jokes, or parapraxes).